Urban Gentility
I am in the least friendly place of my life when it comes to Cornell University. The wounds of my ouster from my 25-year home on the edge of campus in Ithaca have pretty much faded, even though I get the occasional blast from the past. Recently I heard that my long-time neighbor and friend with the unique name of Clover Drinkwater has gotten crosswise with the current inhabitants due to an AirBnB incident involving the carriage house suite, but that is little more than a side chuckle to me. Clover and I always got along marvelously, but that was mostly because I worked very hard over the years to not offend her in any way, and indeed, to befriend her. My current concerns over the University are the same concerns that inhabit the national news cycle and they have to do with the fine line that virtually all major university leaders must walk with regard to the current Israeli/Palestinian conflict in Gaza. I have often noticed that a major research university like Cornell is a study in contrasts when it comes to conservatism versus progressiveness. When Republicans denigrate the liberal elite, they are generally talking about people like myself that have been educated in Ivy League institutions like Cornell. It seems neither here nor there that Cornell is perhaps the least Ivy of the Ivy League given its foundation in disciplines like agricultural. For anyone who knows Cornell, they would also recognize that for every academic unit like the Hotel School (arguably the best of its kind in the world), there is a juxtaposed school like the School of Industrial and Labor Relations that is as progressive as the labor movement of the early Twentieth Century. In many ways, Clover Drinkwater represents that contrast as much as anyone I know. She is a lawyer by training who spent her life working in the conservative realm of trust and estate law in Upstate New York, and yet, as a lifelong Ithaca resident, she cannot help but be permeated with that left-leaning liberalism that exudes across the town of two colleges.
As for the Middle East conflict, Cornell is heavily populated both in its student body and its faculty with people who hail from the Jewish metropolitan cadre. As a group, the Jewish community, while generally very commercial in their orientation, are very liberal and thus a solid part of the liberal elite that are the ire of arch-conservatives. I will note for the record that many of the leaders of the conservative caucus are also graduates of the same sort of eastern liberal colleges, and indeed the Ivy Leagues. That cadre needs the funding that often comes to Washington from the coffers of the Jewish community, so they have generally become very pro-Israeli, since it has been a dominant cause of the Jewish community for eighty years. Needless to say, that community is on the Israeli side of conflict in Gaza, with strong and unflinching condemnation of Hamas in the broadest sense that the Palestinian community has been more supportive of Hamas than not in its championing of the two-state solution for the Palestinian cause. That is not to say that the Jewish community unilaterally supports the tactics of Benjamin Netanyahu. It more does not, rather than does from my observation, but it gives little or no sympathy for the Palestinians of Gaza that have supported or even quietly suffered the plans of Hamas that culminated in the October 7th terroristic attacks on Israeli settlements and their residents. The tactics of Hamas have quite intentionally blanketed all Palestinians and cast them in enough of a similar light that they as collateral damage to the rooting out of Hamas from Gaza are bearing the brunt of this war. It is not unfair to say that Hamas has willingly sacrificed their own Palestinian people in their view of the Palestinian cause overall. Despite whatever efforts you believe the Israeli IDF have undertaken to be careful when it comes to Palestinian civilians, they have been unable to not have massive collateral impacts on the general citizenry of Gaza, which is heavily dominated by children and young people.
On the other side of the political spectrum are progressives, who are generally far more pro-Palestine than not. Regardless of the concentration of Jews at a school like Cornell, the school is also a hotbed of progressive thinking, and as such, has a higher than normal concentration of progressive pro-Palestinian thinkers. None of that is a new phenomenon and the leaders of schools like Cornell are well aware of the juxtapositioning on this issue that exists in their fabric. So, when this particular issue explodes as it has over the past two months, they should be well prepared to understand how best to tread the line of their constituencies so as not to offend in any direction. The problem is, when the sentiments run to the extremes, the mere line-straddling efforts do not only not suffice, they seem to offend, and often in both directions simultaneously. We seem to be in a “you’re either for us or against us” moment. Even though most of these institutions are now led by prominent women leaders (who are often better at compromise than men), they are finding themselves on the firing line, both figuratively and literally, as happened yesterday at the university of Pennsylvania. Leading a major research university these days is not an enviable position.
Despite my dissonance with Cornell at this moment, I have been a member of the Cornell Club of New York for almost thirty-five years and, as previously mentioned in these pages, it is where Kim and I are most comfortable staying when we come to New York. We are here for our annual kids’ holiday visit and we arrived at JFK , as usual, and Ubered our way into midtown traffic as one must. We only had a few hours at the Club before heading into the theater and cabaret district for our first gathering with family and friends. It happened to be the Santacon day in New York so it all seemed more Christmas-like than normal with dozens of Santas running here and there. We didn’t tell Mama, but we chose to eat at Kim’s favorite cabaret, Don’t Tell Mama. After an unusually crowded and slow Uber ride back across town back to the Club, we nudged our way through the Christmas rickshaws and were laughing all the way.
This morning, I awoke to a midtown Sunday morning that was as quiet as the prior night was raucous. I like the breakfast room at the Cornell Club, less because it offers a sumptuous buffet, than because it reminds me of the gentility of the urban experience. It seems that this quiet in the storm of New York City is emblematic of the quiet that the campus usually holds from the ills of the world. But while the Ithaca campus is ablaze with controversy, the Cornell Club remains a bastion of tranquility that seems to be a demilitarized zone for the urban soul. Until the ills of the world find themselves coming to the Cornell Club, I will keep coming back here just for the quiet of the urban gentility of the breakfast hour.